Strip, Strip, Hooray

Just how old IS this guy?!

I'm sorry to see the passing of Queen Elizabeth, although 96 years is a good run for anyone. While "The Royals" have never been of particular interest to me, I have great respect for the Queen's 70+ years of public service. Especially considering that Joe Biden hasn't put in a single day of public service in his entire career. Unless you want to count his spending billions of dollars on the newest (ahem) Covid "vaccines"...

That's right - the FDA has approved "emergency use" of a new Covid vaccine formulation that hasn't been tested on a single human being...and only eight mice. This from the same agency that said it was unsafe to even try Ivermectin for Covid because it had only been shown to be safe on millions of humans for decades. 

As a bonus (click the link above for details and data), the new generation of vaccines is unlikely to prevent or even slow infection, transmission, or serious illness. But it will make billions for big pharma (which, entirely coincidentally, provides 75% of the funding for the FDA), make government look like it's doing something/anything, and continue to provide jobs for fewer than a dozen mice.

And is it just me, or are we having a weird national deja vu moment...

This week the Bidens welcomed The Obamas back to the White House for the unveiling of their official portraits. There was pomp, circumstance, and a strange scraping sound that turned out to be me scratching my bald head while asking "Didn't we do this years ago with completely different portraits?!"

And the answer is yes...yes we did. But apparently, we now have to allow the Obamas to return to the White House every 4 years or so to unveil new paintings of themselves while pretending the previous versions never happened. In much the same way I like to pretend that 8 years of the Obamas never happened.

FROM THE VAULT (Feb 14, 2018)

Oh, you just knew we had to share our take on the preposterous new portraits of Barry and Michelle. And we've got to admit that we're having a grand time watching effete Leftists struggling to explain why these alleged works of art are swoon-worthy.

Barry's is hilariously surreal and lacks only a unicorn to properly depict the self-obsessed fantasy world he lived in. Seriously, it practically screams "this man has no contact with reality."

We do, however, like the fact that the vines are already growing over his legs - giving us hope that he will eventually disappear entirely.

Coming soon to a "choom gang" van near you.

Michelle's portrait is just flat out, laughably hideous and deserves a non-traditional display.

Bonus! You can chill your groceries with her cold glare!

Although it wasn't our intent, we actually improved her wretched portrait by adding the colorful crayon illustrations. The actual painting looks like the work of a not-very-talented school kid who still got a C+ for "trying very, very hard."

The portrait is astonishingly amateurish, lifeless, and flat - although we actually agree with the artist's decision to give Michelle's painting no background. After all, what background did we ever get on the woman herself, other than that she had no pride in America until Obama elbowed his way into our national nightmares and, per her laughably self-centered university "thesis," that she just plain doesn't like white folks.

Perhaps it's just the influence of Valentine's Day, but we actually find our hearts warmed by these ghastly portraits...because they're exactly what the subjects deserved.

Two Arms! Two Arms!

As always, you can click the cartoon for a bigger size!

The Truth in Cartooning Law requires me to disclose that I made this cartoon at a time when I genuinely needed a group hug and didn't have access to one. Although if a group had been here, by the time we'd have finished checking each other for infectious pustules the whole hugging mood would have passed.

Frankly, I've recently had a string of bad days, which is to be expected but isn't much fun. I need to be getting out and about and interacting with human beings, because the only thing that can partially fill the void in my life is More Life...but apparently, you have to go looking for that sort of thing rather than waiting for it to show up (unless the FBI thinks you've got a closet full of allegedly top secret documents). But being a real Olympic-class introvert, it's hard for me to get out there and interact with others. 

One bright spot worth mentioning is that work on my writing project is going well. The project relies heavily on custom artwork and I've found an artist who knows how to draw "funny" and is great to work with. I get a fresh shipment of drawings every few days and they're reliably delightful. So I'm really looking forward to sharing it with you when it's ready.

And just to pad things out, here's a cartoon I put on Facebook recently...

And that's all I've got. I'll meet everyone in the comments section for my much-needed virtual group hug!

Complaint Deportment

No, the title of today's post wasn't a typo. Rather, I don't really have much of anything to post to prove I'm still alive other than a number of gripes, so deportment demands that I try to do so amusingly. So here goes.

• I'm currently suffering from significant sciatica pain, which is amusing only because it reminds me that WC Fields used the term "suffering sciatica!" in his movie "Never Give A Sucker An Even Break." It feels like an ice pick in my lower back accompanied by painful numbness (something I wouldn't have thought possible) in my left leg, while my left foot feels like it's in freezing ice water. And this is on the same side as my bad hip, so I'm hobbling around like Long John Silver after a long night of drinking Clan MacGrog.

According to the Internet, there are a number of factors that could be responsible including being obese, not getting exercise, and sitting on your butt all day. So it seems like the proper treatment consists of applying heat regularly while simultaneously not being a fat, lazy slob. So I'm definitely going to be using a hot pack.

• Speaking of health, which is pretty much all old people do, I had to wear a heart monitor for a couple of weeks about a month ago and yesterday I was sent a cryptic report which my doctor will interpret for me on Thursday.  Apparently there's dilation in my "sinus of Valsalva," which is definitely a phrase you should imagine spoken in the voice of WC Fields.

I also have "Grade 1 left ventricular diastolic dysfunction" which Google tells me can potentially be fatal, although it also says that about everything from tapioca to hiccups. So I took comfort from another part of the Internet which mentioned that virtually 100% of people over 60 have the condition and neither they nor their doctors find it interesting. Okay!

• I tried to hire a home-cleaning service to help out around here. I'm doing a decent job of tidying, but am less good about cleaning the "infrastructure" as Kathy put it: showers, tubs, floors, countertops, etc. So not knowing how to hire anyone, I did what comes most naturally to me and tried to find a service that was cheap. I found a Groupon deal that would give me four hours of cleaning for about $100, bought it, then tried to schedule the appointment. It did not go well...

"I'm sorry, sir, but the Groupon coupon is only good for general housecleaning, not Deep Cleaning of the sort you're describing."
"What," I asked, "did I mention that pushed us into the realm of Deep Cleaning?"
"You said you wanted your windowsills dusted."

So that's not happening. I may try hiring a different service at some point or not. But for now, I guess I'll have to stop shitting on my windowsills. No, no, only kidding - although I did have an uncle who eventually kept his poop in dresser drawers, presumably because he couldn't afford a safe deposit box.

• In happier news (see, there's that "deportment" thing kicking in again) I actually received the $500 participation prize from the local blood bank and promptly put it in my KIVA.org account. A good friend introduced me to KIVA.org recently and I really like the concept. Using the service, you're able to give $25 micro-loans to people around the world for all kinds of good and interesting reasons. They pay the loan back over the course of six months or a year (with a default rate lower than college students, you can bet) at which point you can take your money out or just lend it again, getting compound Karmic interest.  I can now visit about a dozen countries where people owe me money, and if that doesn't make me a citizen of the world I don't know what would.

• Work continues on my writing project and my Fiverr artist continues to deliver delightful, funny illustrations that I hope to get in front of everyone in the coming months. This particular project helps me in a variety of ways, which will become clear when I'm free to talk about it more.

• Finally, I really DO try to avoid politics these days. But wasn't the FBI raid on Donald Trump's home the threatening kind of blatantly corrupt overreach that, in a purely hypothetical sense, might inspire dictionary-conscious citizens to show Washington DC what insurrection really means?